Nexters members try to enhance the sense of unity and convenience in life through creative app developments. Photo provided by Nexters.

For anyone, there are times when one feels that there is nobody to talk to. The closest friends and family members seem to have forgotten your worries, or you cannot bear to disappoint them with your problems. To resolve such predicament, people can now turn to an application program called “Eting.” Eting is an app designed by the group “Nexters,” in which the users can send their worries and receive replies anonymously. When the user sends out his or her worries, the app sends a message with another person’s worries. This means that the user both becomes a sender and a replier under anonymity. Through anonymous communication, the users receive various answers, ranging from short messages that cheer one up to specific advice that are derived from one’s own experience and thoughts. Apparently a lot of people must have many problems or worry which are hard to handle alone. Eting was downloaded by 360 thousand users in Google Play Store and was ranked the 6th most popular free application in the Apple Application Store on the second day after its release. Nexters consists of university students who strive to create applications that would satisfy their users’ needs and wants. It was originally a team planning a start a company, but during the planning process, the members changed their minds and created an application-making team in 2012 with the motto: Let’s start from doing things that we can actually do by ourselves. What is special about Nexters is that it is a group of application inventors with the sole purpose of inventing apps that suit their users without profits, and with planners, developers and designers all coordinating together. The members’ term is one-academic term followed by a vacation period. During the semester, as students are busy with their schoolwork, they study IT branches together or individually. The vacation periods are when the real work begins; the planners first submit their project proposals, and the members hold a meeting to discuss how they will develop the application. During the meeting, the members form teams for each application and work until the applications are ready to be uploaded on the Play Store. Although the process sounds simple, it often results in a demanding work schedule that allows no break or sleep to meet the deadline. “Even though we have a whole vacation ahead of us, considering the fact that we create an application from the scratch, it is no small feat,” said Shin Seung-won, a senior from Inha University, one of the planners of the club. “Also as the planners, developers and designers all have different points of view and matters of importance, it can take quite a while to reach a consensus.” Through the process of mediating their opinions, the team members learn to understand diverse perspectives. “As much as it takes time to settle the clash of opinions, the members bond together as well,” Shin said. The team gets to know each other by staying up all night together to establish an app. “Once, we decided to meet in Sadang and spent all night to develop the new app a few days before the submission deadline. Strangely there were no 24 hour cafes in Sadang, so we went from one place to another, shivering in cold, until we settled in Lotteria. While a few people in the restaurant were eating hamburgers, we took out our laptops and worked all night. It’s actually a sad story, but our mission was accomplished.” The Nexters became officially famous with Eting, but the members said they would also like to recommend BINN and Vobble. BINN is an application that receives the users’ class timetables and formulates a new timetable in which everyone has free time. The application can be very useful for team projects or for friends who want to get together throughout the semester. The other program called Vobble is an unique application alllowing the users to “play back their memories.” It is designed to expand the horizion of memorization beyond visual capacity. Vobble lets the users record their special moments at a special place, and when he or she revisits the place, the recording automatically plays out with the built-in GPS system. The users can also save pictures along with the voice recording, reminding them of their memories.“The primary goal of our applications is simple: utility,” Shin said. “Most of the ideas that we came up with are things that can make our lives more convenient. We want our users to use our services with maximum utility.”Another useful application that Nexters is preparing to launch is the Mid-spot.” It is an app for a group of friends who can find the mid-spot from their current locations. The app provides restaurant reviews and recommends popular restaurants or pubs that friends can meet. “I got the idea from my own experience when common night outs with friends were always near Gangnam or Sinchon station,” said Lee Bo-bin, the developer of the Mid-spot, a senior in Sungkonghoe University.“For some, such destinations can be far from home so I thought it would be more convenient if people could meet in a place where they could meet fairly quickly.”Like Lee, the members of Nexters strive to create applications with the pure purpose of making lives of the users easier and more enjoyable.“I guess Nexters is all about diversity,” Shin said with a smile. “It is this diversity that makes the club so attractive, and it also helps being creative. I hope that Nexters maintain this diversity and that all of our members can continue to build their skills and become more mature.”